the roof, made of old to receive the
rains of heaven. Around the Hall were still left the old cubicula or
dormitories, (small, high, and lighted but from the doors,) which now
served for the sleeping-rooms of the humbler guest or the household
servant; while at the farther end of the Hall, the wide space between the
columns, which had once given ample vista from graceful awnings into
tablinum and viridarium, was filled up with rude rubble and Roman bricks,
leaving but a low, round, arched door, that still led into the tablinum.
But that tablinum, formerly the gayest state-room of the Roman lord, was
now filled with various lumber, piles of faggots, and farming utensils.
On either side of this desecrated apartment, stretched, to the right, the
old lararium, stripped of its ancient images of ancestor and god; to the
left, what had been the gynoecium (women's apartment).

One side of the ancient peristyle, which was of vast extent, was now
converted into stabling, sties for swine, and stalls for oxen. On the
other side was constructed a Christian chapel, made of rough oak planks,
fastened by plates at the top, and with a roof of thatched reeds. The
columns and wall at the extreme end of the peristyle were a mass of
ruins, through the gigantic rents of which loomed a grassy hillock, its
sides partially covered with clumps of furze. On this hillock were the
mutilated remains of an ancient Druidical crommel, in the centre of which
(near a funeral mound, or barrow, with the bautastean, or gravestone, of
some early Saxon chief at one end) had been sacrilegiously placed an
altar to Thor, as was apparent both from the shape, from a rude,
half-obliterated, sculptured relief of the god, with his lifted hammer,
and a few Runic letters. Amidst the temple of the Briton the Saxon had
reared the shrine of his triumphant war-god.

Now still, amidst the ruins of that extreme side of the peristyle which
opened to this hillock were left, first, an ancient Roman fountain, that
now served to water the swine, and next, a small sacellum, or fane to
Bacchus (as relief and frieze, yet spared, betokened): thus the eye, at
one survey, beheld the shrines of four creeds: the Druid, mystical and
symbolical; the Roman, sensual, but humane; the Teutonic, ruthless and
destroying; and, latest riser and surviving all, though as yet with but
little of its gentler influence over the deeds of men, the edifice of the
Faith of Peace.

Across the peristy